Blogger Fixes Issues with Blog Lists and Scheduled Posts

Just as a short announcement, those experiencing issues with the Blogger in Draft features of Blog Lists and scheduled posts should have no further trouble. Blogger in Draft's blog just announced that bugs with scheduled posts' permalinks and problems with renaming and caching Blog List widgets' contents have been fixed.

Update (03/04): In reality, the permalink bug remains unresolved.

Update (03/07): Permalink bug now again reported as fixed.

Google Books' Library Function Overhauled

It's not a huge overhaul -- as in there are very few new features -- but Google Books' Library feature (goes to my library) has just gotten a (weak) social layer. You can now add a user to your "Favorites" (separate from all of Google's other bookmarking or link-saving or friend-type applications), but it doesn't really do anything at the moment except pop up a section on your own library page with links to your favorites' libraries. Hopefully there will be more involved in the feature later this year as Google continues making enhancements.

The controls for dealing with items in your library have also been streamlined to the point of no longer having to leave the library page to change a book's labels or ratings, or to attach a note (which if I'm not mistaken is another new feature) to it. I'm glad to see these enhancements (which are partially covered on Inside Google Book Search), since always changing pages was really frustrating usability-wise. Good work, Google! Keep the enhancements coming!

Funny Randomization: Microsoft Downgrades Vista

Found a little site called isyournewbicycle.com, which allows you to plug in any word before the domain (such as I did for this with microsoft.isyournewbicycle.com) and get back a randomized phrase. On the third or fourth try, I got this little gem:



Great fit for the company that made the worst operating system I've ever heard of, eh? Just thought it was funny. Any takers? Beg-to-disagree-ers? Hit the comments; I'm waiting to hear from you!

Google Releases Health Screenshots

Google posted "Google Health, a first look" on the Official Google Blog early this morning, and included screenshots of both the sign-in screen and the internal homepage associated with users' profiles, which displays some vital statistics. I'll only use the homepage shot here, since the login screen is pretty standard-Google.



Aside from appearing to have been taken on a Mac (judging from button styling and text rendering), the service appears (appropriately) pretty Googley to me. It looks very cool, and displays a sample of what happens when you link your profile with a health-care provider. Namely, the homepage displays what providers have been linked from the current profile.

So, what features can be seen from the screenshot? Obviously the lucky ducks in Cleveland who get to actually use the service know first-hand, but until the service is released (again, Google, please do so soon!) the rest of us have to be content with screenshots.

Within the list of sections on the left, Health appears to have tracking for the following things:

• Notices (presumably notes from physicians or reminders generated by Google Health itself)
• Drug interactions (useful for making sure you won't get any nasty side-effects from that new prescription)
• Profile (includes age, gender, height, weight, etc.; conditions [diabetes, hypertension, etc.]; medications; allergies; procedures ("Have I ever had an appendectomy?"); test results; and immunizations)

Besides the record-keeping stuff, it's also possible to add to your profile, import medical records, request an appointment at one of your associated institutions, and find a doctor.

Given this impressive array of stuff, I'm raring to try this service out the moment it's launched. I can't wait to import all the medical records of the last 17 years and see what happened to me in my childhood that I can't remember (due to that annoying children-don't-remember-stuff problem).

So, when does the rest of the world get to try this thing?

[Image credit: Official Google Blog, used as fair use for news reporting and commentary]

Google Re-Launches JotSpot as Google Sites

After months of waiting, Google has re-launched the JotSpot wiki service -- acquired sixteen months ago -- as Google Sites. Annoyingly, it's only available for Google Apps accounts, which means I don't have access to it. I could create an Apps account, yes, but I don't have a domain name with which to sign up. I plan to get a domain for this site sometime in the near future (read: in the next year or so), so my own testing will have to wait until then.

There's a lot of talk about how Google doesn't mention the word "wiki" anywhere in the materials promoting Google Sites. JotSpot also did the it's-not-a-wiki thing, meaning nobody can really say what the product is, exactly. Some bloggers just call it a wiki despite Google's (intentional?) omissions, and I agree with that. JotSpot always was a wiki service, from what I heard and read about it, and the rebranding isn't going to change that.

Meanwhile, I can still bask in the knowledge that JotSpot is alive and kicking at Google. Now how did the press (and several bloggers) find out about this last night? I only got the email 100 minutes ago. Hmm... Darn press releases.

For the review that I can't write due to lack of access, check out this very good one by Dennis Howlett at ZDNet (also linked above as "about").

Google Talk Adds "Chatback" Button Feature

It's always been frustrating how you couldn't have a Google Talk chat box on your website. Google changed that a couple days ago, when they announced Google Talk Chatback, which is a badge you put on your site that opens a special version of the Google Talk gadget. It looks interesting, and a version I could add (and considered) is shown below:



Now, the reason I'm not adding one is twofold. First, I never got very many hits from the chat box I did find (which I recently disabled because nobody used it and it just slowed down page loads). Second, it's not really any change from what I mentioned in my first point. Neither service saves histories to my Gmail account, and neither appears to support chat room type conversations, where anybody who's online can chat with everyone else on the same site.

So in short, I have no reason to add it. I may in the future, simply to pare down my list of accounts in Pidgin (and enable chatting with site visitors when I'm away from Pidgin on my PC), but I also lack the time to sit around talking to people on this site at the moment. Since it is a partial implementation of a Google Talk feature that I suggested a while back (indirectly; I asked for a Blogger chat widget), I decided to blog about it even though I won't be using it immediately. Watch my sidebar, though; I might be making some changes at some point to cut down on the amount of content over there.

Google Docs Toolbars Redesigned

The Google Docs team has been busy lately! Just today, the editing tools in Google Docs (and supposedly Presentations, though I can't confirm because I don't use Presentations currently) have been redesigned. Google Blogoscoped (which is also the source of one of my images) summarizes the changes, which I will confirm here.

Observe the old:



And the new:



There's a rather substantial difference there (unlike the last difference I pointed out, which garnered a "what difference?" comment from a visitor.

So, what exactly has changed? Well, let me enumerate the changes:

1. Lots of the buttons have changed
2. The Save button has been moved to the toolbar
3. A Print button has been added to the toolbar
4. There are no longer buttons in the upper right (which I actually liked)
5. The spell checker is now in the toolbar, rather than at the bottom right
6. The "Also editing now" box has moved a bit to the right (this from Google Blogoscoped, unconfirmed)

In the Google Blogoscoped post, Philipp Lenssen muses at the end what would happen if an interface change made things worse, rather than better as most of the updates so far have. He makes a very good point that desktop software can always remain un-upgraded at the discretion of the PC's maintainer, but Web software is changed whether or not the users like the modifications. Take Office 2007 as an example. I hate the Ribbon idea, and I can simply refuse to buy the new version. But what happens if Google messes up? Hopefully, "Don't Be Evil" also covers doing things their users don't like. Then again, that didn't stop the Google Reader "friends" fiasco (which still has yet to be reversed).

[First image credit: Google Blogoscoped, CC-BY-NC, modified by myself and hereby released under the same license]

Blogger Scheduled Post Permalink Issues

I've been seeing some feedback on this issue myself, and decided to weigh in with a post of my own. Most of the feedback I've seen has been in comments on the original post at the Blogger in Draft blog, from users who have had issues with permalinks on posts published using the still-in-testing scheduled posts feature being to the blog's homepage, rather than to the posts' individual pages. I wasn't having the problem, but it's shown up a couple of times recently, presumably as a result of some tweaking on the part of Blogger.

Interestingly, I shouldn't even be having the problem because I don't use FTP to publish. Blogger hosts my site, and the reports I saw mostly mentioned the problem with FTP blogs. Nevertheless, I have had the problem and would like to add my voice to the chorus, in the hopes that more feedback and reports will get Google to fix the problem faster. I've found post scheduling to be a real help, and would hate to see it get yanked because of a trivial bug. Good luck squashing the bug, Google, and all the best for introducing scheduled posts even with this little glitch!

If it will help troubleshooting (this is directed at Google; you can stop reading now unless you want details on when I got the bug), I had the problem on a post I had edited after scheduling, which I don't normally do. If there's different code handling the "save changes" publish action versus the initial "schedule" publish action, perhaps there's a bug in the "save changes" branch/function that is looking for a permalink? I'm just speculating; I have no idea how the Blogger code works.

Update (23:00): A Blogger team member, Pete, has thanked us users for all the reports of this bug -- and noted that it will be fixed in the near term -- in a recent comment (10:01) on the Blogger in Draft Blog post.

Update (02/29): The Blogger in Draft blog announces that this and a couple other issues have been fixed.

Update (03/04): New data, new reports, old status; the bug is not actually fixed.

Update (03/07): Once again, the bug has been reported as fixed.

Official Gmail Blog Posts Internal Screenshot?

I just looked over the post about Gmail invisibility at the Official Gmail Blog, and noticed that their screenshot is a bit funky. Compare the two images below:





The first image is mine; the second is what the Gmail Blog posted. Now, there isn't much different there, but they aren't posting screenshots of the interface the rest of us see. Makes me wonder what enhancements Google is hiding in the internal Gmail interface, waiting to be released to the masses. I hope there's some good stuff there... I want box controls! :-D

[Second image credit: Official Gmail Blog, under a claim of fair use for commentary]

FriendFeed Officially Launches

After five months in private beta, FriendFeed has now opened its doors and enabled simple, immediate registration for anyone who desires to join the community. FriendFeed, which provides a stream of friends' activities aggregated from a pool of nearly 30 services (as of this writing), also raised $5,000,000 in funding through two of its co-founders.

The changes have been coming thick and fast at FriendFeed, and I anticipate that they'll just keep on coming in the future. Since they got Kevin Fox working on the UI, things have been getting better and better. Why just a few days ago, they added tabs to the interface, and it's always been quite user-friendly and easy-to-use. I have had an account for a few months now, and I like the service. Perhaps now that it's public, more people I know will sign up for it... Or not. Let's face it: Most of my friends are pretty non-technical. But I'll just see how it goes. Meanwhile, enjoy the open registration, everyone!

Google Health Trial in Cleveland

A few days ago, I got a slew of posts in Google Reader about a trial of Google Health scheduled to take place at the Cleveland Clinic. I finally decided to blog about it. I won't go into too much detail, since that's already been covered, but I will share my feelings about the service.

First, a little background. Google Health was started over a year ago, possibly under the name of M Scrapbook (Google Blogoscoped) as a service to store all health-related information in an online database accessible to health care providers across the country and around the world. Microsoft did something similar last year, when they started the HealthVault site.

Anyway, I've been waiting for this a long time (well, since October, which is when I found out about it, but still), and I'm very, very glad to see it surface as a bona fide service that is going into testing. The trial will serve at least 1,500 patients from the Cleveland, OH, clinic, and the number could go as high as 10,000.

Interestingly, the announcements on the various Google blogs came along with a note that http://www.google.com/health/ now goes to the login page revealed last month, rather than Google Co-op's Health topic.

So, I'm happy about this for one big reason: It will hopefully give me another Google toy to play with very soon. I'm also happy because my doctors will (also hopefully) put all my information into the system once it's launched and I give them permission, which would let me access my own medical records without going to the doctor's office.

I've probably talked about this before, but I would much rather Google store my information than Microsoft. It's also, indeed, integrated under the same account I currently use to access Gmail, Blogger, Google Reader, and all the other services I utilize on a daily (or almost-daily) basis. I don't particularly trust Microsoft, and the business with WGA and Windows Vista hasn't helped that negative opinion.

But to get off of Microsoft-bashing, here's to the success of Google Health! May it be speedily launched to the rest of the United States and the world at large.

Blogger in Draft On-Login Redirection

I remember when I first started using Blogger in Draft and I had to enter draft.blogger.com, go through the ADD_SERVICE_TOKEN redirect, and would end up at www.blogger.com instead, meaning I had to change www to draft and hit Enter again to get to the URL I originally requested. In the last few weeks, though, that seems to have changed. Now when I navigate to my blogger keyword bookmark, I am redirected correctly back to draft.blogger.com. No more double-navigation on my browser session's first use of Blogger! Thanks, Google!

New Invisibility in Gmail Chat, Unsupported by Other Google Clients

Googlers seem to be spending all their time developing the Google Talk service on the Gmail section of it. Garett Rogers (ZDNet) and Ionut Alex Chitu (Google Operating System) have so far picked up on the story.

It is now possible, only in Gmail at the moment, to set your status as "Invisible" like other IM services. You can see which of your contacts are online and available for chat without them knowing that you are available. That is, unless they've also discovered the new invisibility feature (in which case neither of you will see each other).

So, here's the status menu entry to turn it on:



And here's the sidebar with the function active:



Ionut at Google Operating System has also rooted out a problem with the current implementation: Using the Talk client or gadget (or other client that does not support invisibility) at the same time as Gmail chat will disable the feature until you sign out of that other client. Also, there is some question in the comments to that post as to whether Google implemented its own invisibility mode or actually implemented an XMPP specification for such a feature. Good question; I freely admit, I don't know how to make such a determination.

I do like this feature, though. I might actually keep chat turned on now. The desire for invisibility has been a very cool flame burning in me, and it never occurred to me to suggest it. I'm glad it's being implemented.

Now if only Google would update the downloadable client once in a while. I mean really! Have the source code files been destroyed or something? Are they trying to make users mad? I personally prefer to keep my chat out of the browser and in a separate program, but with all these new features and no support in the client, that's becoming less and less practical. Grr!

Update (02/26): The Offical Gmail Blog finally made its post last night, 2008-02-25.

The Sharper Image Files for Bankruptcy Protection

Yipe! I knew The Sharper Image's products were niche stuff, but I didn't think sales were this bad. The company filed for bankruptcy protection (as reported by the New York Times) due to slipping sales, stiffer competition, and image problems with its line of Ionic Breeze air purifiers. They'll also be closing approximately half of their stores, if I read the article correctly.

I have a pretty good idea as to why they're not doing very well. The problem with The Sharper Image is that their prices for things are a good chunk more than identical (but differently-branded) items elsewhere. For instance, a blue InfoGlobe clock I bought from the Discovery Channel Store was an extra $10-$15 at The Sharper Image, with the only difference being the logo displayed on a small panel above the five buttons on the front. Excessive markups are a bad way to try and increase profits, since the Internet makes it easier than ever to compare prices at different stores before buying anything.

I can't say I won't miss the stores (if they close the ones I go to), but they kind of had this coming, and I haven't bought anything there in years, if ever. They're still great places to browse interesting and unusual trinkets, though.

Vector Magic's Bad Decisions

I've never mentioned the Vector Magic service before. It's probably a good thing, too. I just got an email from the service last night that officially announced their split from Stanford University (where they started as a research project). It gave the new domain and other information. Before I get into their mistakes, let me take a stroll down Memory Lane and recall what the service used to be like.

When I first found out about the project, Vector Magic was an early-testing application featured on the Lifehacker blog. I clicked through and tried a few vectorizations, and was relatively unimpressed with the results. Nevertheless, it was a free service and I created an account to keep an eye on it. I never actually downloaded any vector files because the images I wanted to vectorize never came out very well at all.

Fast-forward to last night, when I got the email. Now I find out that this nothing-to-write-home-about service wants to charge for downloading vector files of the resulting images. Not only do I have to heavily edit and fix the result, but I have to pay for the privilege of doing so. They're also making a desktop application eventually, which will also cost money (more than $50, judging from available information).

So it's no longer an option, since I have to spend money to even get low-quality vector images I should just recreate from scratch in Inkscape, once I learn how to use the program. And I no longer have an account (more in a second), which means I don't even get access to the vectorized images I uploaded while the project was still at Stanford.

That's a big mistake, really. When I create an account somewhere, I expect it to persist as long as the service is in operation, no matter whether it changes owners, domain names, hosting providers, or whatever. Accounts and user data should be constant, and it is up to the maintainers of the service to ensure the portability of the user's information. Vector Magic claims that their privacy policy as written while they were with Stanford prohibits them from migrating accounts and uploaded data to their new location. I quote the email's PS regarding the (non-)migration:

When we moved away from Stanford we were not able to migrate the user accounts due to our privacy policy while at Stanford, in which we promised not to share your information. We know it sounds silly that we can't give ourselves the information, but we take privacy and security very seriously. Please sign up for a new account on the new website.

Unfortunately, the images uploaded to the Stanford web service are no longer available.

Oy! I really don't trust that bit right there. I think they're making excuses for not transferring what's probably gigabytes of data from one server to another. Chalking it up to being privacy conscious and fooling people into thinking they're doing it as an indicator of their good will doesn't ring true in my book. I would much rather have access to the images I uploaded before, thank you, than be happy (which I'm obviously not) about the wonderfully conscientious decision made by the Vector Magic team.

Admittedly, the old policy was -- I believe -- a contract between users and Stanford, and now the new agreement is between users and Vector Magic, so I can see the technicality involved in the decision. But common sense should be able to overcome technicalities, I think.

So, the combination of this move fiasco and the fact that I never got very good results anyway (results for which I would now be charged) means I probably will not create a new account at Vector Magic. I'll stick to Inkscape's own tracing plugin, thank you. My dissatisfaction has been a major factor in the decision to add rel="nofollow" to the link to their site, above, too.

As an afterthought, I'll mention the timing of this post. I was initially going to publish the evening of February 21, but I had problems with my browser (both FF and IE, strangely) and decided to reboot to solve the problem, then was called away to dinner for several hours. I didn't get back to the computer for a while, and it was too late to publish by then. So I slightly rewrote the post to be in the past tense and published it now instead. "I'll get you, my Windows, and your stupid bugs, too!"

Google Docs: Expand or Improve?

Ionut Alex Chitu (Google Operating System) and Philipp Lenssen (Google Blogscoped) seem to agree with each other that Google Docs needs improvement. However, there are differences in the ways they each approach that improvement.

For example, Ionut thinks Google should stop adding features and concentrate on improving the ones that are already there. Philipp -- if I'm reading his post correctly -- has an idea for "feature gadgets" -- menu items scripted via a Docs API that can access selection, whole document, etc. and modify it in a way that implements an advanced feature that most people wouldn't use. Unlike Microsoft Office, which includes every imaginable feature, Philipp's idea keeps menu clutter to a minimum, giving people their own useful features without making everyone see them.

I like that idea a lot, and I think these screenshots (taken from Google Blogoscoped's post under CC-BY-NC) illustrate pretty much a change I'd agree with:


Current Google Docs


Modified Google Docs interface with a "More Actions" menu like Gmail's (which can be extended by third-party scripts) and a few other changes

I don't particularly agree with the tab changes ("Revisions" renamed to "Revise" and "Share" combined with "Publish", especially since "Revise" is far too similar to "Edit"), but I like the overall idea of the gadget menu.

Interesting Thoughts: People Ratings

Brought to my attention by Google Blogoscoped, I think Reza Behforooz has an interesting idea in his post on Washington's (the state, not the city in D.C.) recent legislation to have DUI drivers sport yellow license plates. I quote his thoughts and ideas:

I love reputation based systems like eBay and wikipedia. It's a good way to build trust and fight spam. I personally wish there was an easy way for people to have a publicly visible reputation that was influenced by anyone. Imagine a world where people could easily point their cell phone at you and give you a plus or a minus vote. If you let someone merge in, the other driver can give you a small star. If you stop and help someone with a flat tire, you might get lots of stars. If you cut people off or cheat on the carpool lane, you get bad karma. That's similar to PageRank. We all look at reviews for movies, restaurants, books, hotels, etc. And we look at the star rating on youtube, netflix, etc. Why not have it for people? There are now web sites that do this for professors and classes at universities. An open reputation based system is so much more effective than the usual student reviews for university faculty. Now imagine we did that in the office for everyone.

I don't know why, but it kind of strikes me as being a good idea. Community ratings play a large role in online systems, so why not apply them to the real-world? After all, everyone has a reputation anyway. Being able to point your cell phone at people and give them a sort of "star" rating (seen on sites like YouTube, Google Video, and many others) could be the next big way to provide, say, law enforcement with a means to identify problem citizens. If people consistently get one-star ratings, that could be a sign that they're doing something wrong. ;-)

Evidence of Gmail Task List

Following the post I made yesterday about the rumored Gmail task list feature that "turned out to be" RTM, I saw a comment from Garett at Google Operating System and revisited the Groups thread pertaining to his original post. Users on Groups have posted evidence that Google is internally testing a task list feature.

The evidence comes in the form of CSS rules. One particularly interesting one references corp.google.com, which is (as far as I know) an internal network address accessible only within Google. Take a look at this rule (I've added line breaks and indents for clarity and space):

.gtasks-sprite {
    background-image: url(http://www.corp.google.com↵
        /~bolinfest/gtasks/sprites.png)
}

Looks like Garett was right after all. Yipe! I still want support for other task services, though. And the option to turn it on and off.

Remember Your Add-ons!

Ionut Alex Chitu made a very good point last night about Greasemonkey and related add-ons. His post, entitled "Your Gmail Adds New Features", showcases three (last I checked) separate instances where people installed Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail and then forgot about them. In each case, the add-ons' features were interpreted as being part of the Gmail core, rather than add-on functionality available only in that customized browser.

Yesterday, the post I published about Garett Rogers' discovery of a tip-off to a supposed task list feature in Gmail was also revealed to be another forgotten add-on (RTM for Gmail, if you're wondering), a case I mentioned in the comments to Ionut's post. The title to Ionut's entry is quite apt, because it's your Gmail that gets the new features, and very few other users can confirm what you see. Google sometimes does have small test groups, but they're never (so far as I know) limited to one account...

So, what you can learn from this is to always remember what sites you have installed add-ons and enhancements for, and what scripts/extensions you have enabled. That way, when you see the new functionality in your browser, you won't rush to your blog and write a useless post about something that doesn't exist. (If you write fictional rumors, of course, that might be perfect inspiration, but you know what I mean.)

Actually, it just occurred to me that the people affected may have been using browsers on others' computers. In that case, ask the owner (or primary user) of the computer you're using if they've added any scripts/extensions/whatever that might be modifying the behavior of sites you're using.

Update (02/17): Garett insists in a comment at Google Operating System that he posted a screenshot of RTM accompanying his post about a bona fide task list feature in Gmail. The saga continues... And it looks like I was wrong, actually.

Gmail Task List Feature?

Garett Rogers posted something very strange this afternoon. It seems someone wrote in with a screenshot of a task list feature in Gmail and a (to me, rather dubious) explanation of how it got there. He thinks it's likely to be "similar to the 'Remember The Milk' addon" (he says RTM for Gmail uses Greasemonkey, which I don't believe is correct). The screenshot he posted, which I won't duplicate for fear of copyright infringement (see the original post), looks very, very similar to the RTM pane I have in my Gmail account right now, down to the icons and styling.

I'm excited if Google is going to add a new feature, but I'd rather it not be this one. Actually, let me re-state that. I'm excited if there's going to be a task list, but I hope Google has a stand-alone list as an option, and also offers support for RTM, Toodle (I think?), and some of the other more popular task management services. A list within Gmail doesn't do me much good, because I really like RTM. I wonder what's really up, though. Garett's post doesn't look too convincing to me.

Phooey. I got my hopes up for nothing. I actually read the Groups thread Garett linked to, and found that others had already come to the same conclusion I had tentatively in my head. That user somehow has installed the RTM extension and doesn't remember. Here I thought Google was doing something. Oh well, sounds like my suspicion of Garett's post was justified.

Here's what I think is going on. That user sounds very confused, because the task list and its associated tab within Gmail's settings keeps appearing and disappearing. One of two things could be happening: It could either be a hoax, deliberately written to get buzz going about something that's been around for ages; or that user could be going between Firefox (where RTM for Gmail works) and Internet Explorer (where it doesn't). Perhaps it's both, I don't know. But I'm pretty sure that it's just RTM for Gmail, and not a Google feature.

Update (02/17): Garett insists in a comment at Google Operating System that he posted a screenshot of RTM accompanying his post about a bona fide task list feature in Gmail. The saga continues... And it looks like I was wrong, actually.

Scheduled Posts With Blogger

For months and months now, posts with titles like this one's have been writing about convoluted workarounds to one of Blogger's glaring omissions: scheduled future posting. It has always been in Blogger's new version that a post published is a post published, no matter the date (which was only used for sorting). To post to your blog in the future, without actually being there to "push the button, Max," you had to set up a complicated system of mail-to-Blogger and a scheduled email service. (Interestingly, Gmail still lacks scheduled sending of emails... Hint hint, Google! ;-)

All that begins to change now, with the announcement of a Blogger in Draft feature to schedule future posts. Enter a date in the future, before clicking the Publish button, and Blogger will hold the post in its queue, waiting to be actually displayed on your site at the time and date specified. Users who used the future-dating to keep a post on top can still do it, by publishing and then editing the date.

I won't get more specific here, because the Blogger in Draft team has already done a good write-up of their new feature on their own blog.

Suffice it to say, I'm very happy about this addition. It's only available in Blogger's "Draft" version (at http://draft.blogger.com/), but they say it will soon be available in the main interface. I use the Draft interface anyway, to be able to use new stuff like this the moment it's released, but for those of you who don't do so, you know where to go.

I never bothered with the email-based workarounds I mentioned before, actually. They were far too cumbersome for me, and I didn't want to sign up for yet another account I'd use just a few times a year. Since Blogger's on its way to officially supporting the feature of scheduled posts, I now need not worry about such an account after all. So watch out from now on; when posts show up here, I might not actually be at the computer publishing. :-D

Update (03/04): A bug in this feature affecting permalinks was reported and supposedly fixed, but is most definitely not squashed.

Update (03/07): The bug is again being reported as fixed.

Application Storage Architectures Are Important

This quarter and next quarter, I'll be taking music theory classes at school. We're using a program called Musition, distributed by an Australian company by the name Rising Software. Initially when I set it up, it was using a local database of course material with a local data store of audio files and all the other accompanying stuff. A couple days ago, though, my teacher sent out instructions for connecting the program to the network, and it's now 100 times slower.

Previous load time was around five seconds. That was tolerable, especially considering what the program was loading. It also logged me in automatically to a local account. Now, however, it takes around ten minutes to load, most of it spent on "Loading Melody Data". And it requires a username and password. Admittedly, the two together are only nine characters, but it's still an inconvenience. Also, commands that took milliseconds in the locally-stored version take five or ten seconds to execute and return results. The load time and latency are the problems that really get me.

So, what does this teach us? It teaches us that carefully considered storage architectures are important for the usability of any program. Loading all the melody data across the Internet is a really bad idea, especially since only a fraction of the data will be used in any one session. Loading everything over a local network is only marginally better, because it still wastes a lot of time and bandwidth for no good reason.

A better way to do it would be to load the server's data once and then cache it locally, requesting only a last-modified timestamp at each sign-on. That would drastically reduce load time and bandwidth use. I'm sure my school is paying for the bandwidth their server uses; they could definitely prevent drastic cost increases.

I'm not sure how to address the latency problem, because one of the foremost principles of application security is to never trust the user. All possible processing should be done server-side to prevent tampering by the client. Yet, this is most of what's responsible for the delays. If anyone has any ideas, this is your opportunity to leave a shout out in the comments.

I sincerely hope that someone who can do something about this egregious usability problem reads this. It's really an inconvenience to have to wait five, ten, or even fifteen minutes before being able to use the program, and to have five- or ten-second delays after issuing commands. Someone please do something about this architecture!

PS: If you're interested in a fictionalized, in-universe interpretation of this problem, I wrote a companion post on another blog I write for, The Queiba Wars. I also wrote a generalized "Best Practices"-type post on this subject for CodingExperiments.com.

Blogger Blogrolls and Bugfixes

In the last couple days, Google's Blogger team added a new sidebar widget to Blogger In Draft for testing. It's a "Blog List", in essence a blogroll. It displays a list of blogs, and optionally titles of each blog's latest post, snippets of the latest post, and how long it's been since each blog was updated. Users can add sites either manually or by importing from Google Reader subscriptions.

In other news, a list of bugfixes and enhancements were added to mainstream Blogger, including fixes for the label counts bugs (which I have never suffered from, AFAIK) and comment pagination for posts with more than 200 comments. The post editor now loads faster, the "Template" tab for dynamically served blogs (the ones that don't require republishing) is now the "Layout" tab, and the comment form now highlights identity options more clearly.

So, my take on all this is next.

First off, let me say that I want the comment pagination to be optional. Comment pagination drives me crazy on sites like Lifehacker, and comment-tracking services like Co.mments.com can't deal with paginated comments. I would like to see Google add options to 1) adjust the pagination threshold and 2) turn pagination on and off both for the whole blog and for a specific post.

Next, I'd like to comment on the Blog List widget. I tried it last night, and couldn't get it to save after importing my Google Reader list. That explains why I don't have one of those widgets yet; I couldn't get it to work. It would make my sidebar unbearably long anyway.

Finally, the improvements to the comment form, post editor loading time, and the labeling of the template/layout tab are all welcome improvements. Blogger's starting to shape up and become a little more powerful. Now all I want is the ability to create static pages a la WordPress. An integration between Google Page Creator (or whatever they're working on to replace it) and Blogger would be absolutely wonderful.

Update (02/29): There were a couple bugs with renaming and caching in the Blog List feature when it was first released; they are both now fixed.

My Recent Posting Frequency

I know it's been a week since I last posted here, and that I've been really low on post volume for the last month or two. I'm just getting busier with school and have also been getting distracted by Wikipedia (up to over 16,500 contributions as of right now). Also, there hasn't been as much going on that's really stirred an opinion in me, which is really why I blog. I considered blogging about Microsoft's recent bid to acquire Yahoo!, but found I didn't really have a strong opinion to write about. Blogging without an opinion to generate the words doesn't really make good use of the readers' time.

I apologize for the out-of-context post, and if you think this entry is a waste of your time, don't feel obligated to read it. I certainly don't expect every reader to read every post I write; I don't treat other blogs that way.

When something happens that I really want to talk about, know that I will take a break from school (heh, more like reverting vandalism on Wikipedia) to blog about it. As I said, I just haven't been terribly moved by any of the recent announcements made by Google or anyone else. The Microsoft-Yahoo! thing was lacking substance; plenty of other people made comments, and anything I would have said would have just been repetitive. (Yahoo! turned down Microsoft anyway.) I'll blog about a Y! acquisition when something concrete happens. Meanwhile, my posting frequency is going to be lower for the time being. Perhaps all you readers can get useful stuff done for a change instead of reading my random rants. ;-)

GrandCentral Introduces Shared Forwarding Numbers

I don't talk about it much, but I use GrandCentral as my phone number. It works great, since I don't actually have a cell phone or landline of my own. Google gives me a number that will "never" change (it will if they discontinue the service...) and that rings all the phones I have access to... or none at all. One peeve I had, though, is that neither of my parents could sign up for the service (if they wanted to, that is) because our house phone is in my account. That's just changed.

Apparently, the announcement was made yesterday, though I missed it. It must be because I checked my feeds in the morning, and the entry was posted in the late evening. Despite the fact that I missed the announcement (and that I haven't been posting lately, another story), GrandCentral now officially lets you share a forwarding number in different accounts.

Chris Pirillo's Thoughts on Bad Grammar: Same As Mine

As usual, I'm going to ask you to watch the video first before reading my comments:

There, all done? Good, now I can comment away!

This is the kind of thing that drives me crazy, too. I don't know if anyone notices, but I try to keep my English as perfect as I can here on my blog, in my email, on Wikipedia... The list of places where I write goes on -- and in each and every location, I try to use scholarly-sounding English that won't have me embarrassing my school, my parents, or (most importantly) myself.

Chris says he gets emails like that all the time. I can relate; I see loads upon loads of messages like that on Wikipedia, in online school discussion boards, and forums across the Internet. Fortunately, most of the people I correspond with via email and IM have a firm grasp of the English language, and only make mistakes when they're intentional (say they're ignoring the rules for the sake of typing speed). Only a very few people I know personally mutilate English.

So, I beg the world, please watch how you write. It drives geeks like me, Chris, my friend i80and, and all kinds of other people absolutely crazy to try and interpret sentences like, "r u srsly gnna get widnows vitsa? u cnat possiby b srs abt tht!"

That's my rant for the day, then.

Kingston's Got 16GB SD

How big is your SD card? I have a couple 2 GB cards (one for my camera, one for my PDA), and my dad has a 4 GB microSD for his new phone. Kingston has now introduced a 16 GB SD card, which will hold somewhere in the area of 6,000 photos from my 7 megapixel camera (extrapolating from the values I was given). For a paltry (ha!) $231, you, too, can have the biggest SD card on the planet.

Given that the 2 GB cards I use now are about $30-$40, let's do some math here. It takes eight 2 GB cards to make one 16 GB card. Even taking the cheapest price I've seen for a 2 GB card, $32, eight of those would be $246, an extra $15 over buying the 16 GB card outright. The price will probably drop just as dramatically as other memory cards, too.

Consider, when I got my first three 2 GB cards, they were $140 each, with a $40 mail-in rebate (I only got two of the rebates back). Not long after, they dropped below $100. Now they're at $30-$40, and I wonder if I jumped the gun a little too soon. Perhaps I did, but replacements are a lot cheaper.

So, let's just say I'm looking forward to the days of 32 GB or 64 GB (heck, why not 512 GB?) SD cards, when I'll be able to carry my entire home server with Apache, PHP, and MySQL on the same card with a launcher to let me run it on any computer. Dream not of today, but of the future -- the future looks good!